Greetings from Jim Dennis

There's new excitement at the Answer Guy household this month - my book is
shipping! I know this because I pre-ordered it from Amazon, and my order
has arrived. So, now I can tell you it has a purple binding, and that
the cover is white, with a black and white river scene along the top.

[ In the plugs department, if you're going to buy it from Amazon, buy
it through the associate link at our science fiction club, the
Los Angeles Science Fantasy Society.
You'll get a discount, and help a literary organization at the same
time. -- Heather ]

My lovely wife Heather notes that it should also be at Computer Literacy,
if there's one in your area, or you prefer to online shop there.

[ SVLUG's installfests are held
there, and I asked the staff if it was in yet. They said it was at
the warehouse but hadn't hit the stores. That was a week ago, so
they should be in by now. -- Heather ]

Onward to Linux itself. The 2.2.13pre kernel is (fingers indicating tiny
space) this close to being ready. 2.2.10 through 12 have some
memory leaks, so a lot of people are safer staying with whatever their
distribution shipped until it's settled in. Alan Cox is putting a lot of
effort into this one really being solid.

You won't find it mentioned at KernelNotes.org - they have good stuff, but
they don't bother to mention the pre-kernels. If you're a brave soul and
really want to see the latest kernel details, you have to go to kernel.org.
I found the .13pre code at
http://www.us.kernel.org/pub/linux/kernel/alan/2.2.13pre/
though as I've said many times before, I'm no programmer. I just read
README's and comments. (BTW, you can pick a closer mirror if you're in
another country, by replacing "us" with your two letter country code.
Round robin DNS does the rest.)

LinuxCare is sending me on another training visit to another state.
(Although I enjoyed myself in Japan, I'm glad this one is a shorter trip.)
Someone must be looking out for me - the very topic I needed to investigate,
embedded systems, seems to be the big topic for
Linux Journal this month.

I'm sure you didn't come here to read all about that. You came for the
articles. There's a new footer this month to make it easy to get to the
past articles, too. With the short
deadline this month, there will be more than usual next time, I think.